The following essay is reproduced with permission. 
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We all know that time passes at different speeds depending on the situation. For example, when you travel to a new place, time seems to slow down. A week abroad feels much longer than a week at home.
Time also seems to move slower when you’re bored or in pain. When you’re absorbed in something, like music, playing chess, painting, or dancing, your speed seems to increase. More commonly, most people report that time seems to move faster as they get older.
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However, this change in time perception is very mild. Our experience of time may change more fundamentally. In my new book, I describe what I call “time dilation experiences,” where seconds can stretch into minutes.
Why time speeds up or slows down is a bit of a mystery. Some researchers, including myself, believe that subtle changes in time perception are related to information processing. In general, the more information our minds process, including perceptions, sensations, and thoughts, the slower time seems to pass. Children live in a new world, so time moves more slowly.
The new environment is unfamiliar and takes longer. Our attention spans become narrower, we have fewer thoughts, our minds become quieter, and our immersion time decreases. In contrast, boredom prolongs time because an unfocused mind is filled with a huge amount of thought chatter.
Time expansion experience
Time-dilation experiences (or tees) can occur during accidents or emergencies such as car accidents, falls, and assaults. In a time-dilation experience, time appears to expand by orders of magnitude. My research shows that about 85% of people own at least one T-shirt.
Approximately half of all t-shirts are caused by accidents and emergencies. In such situations, people are often surprised at the amount of time it takes to think and act. In fact, many people are convinced that the extra time saved them from serious injury and even saved their lives. This is because you can take precautions that would normally not be possible.
For example, the woman who reported T-shirt dodging a metal barrier falling on her car told me that by “slowing down momentarily,” she was able to “determine how to escape the falling metal.” .
T-shirts are also commonly used in sports. For example, one participant described a tee that occurred during an ice hockey play as “a play that seemed to last about 10 minutes, but all happened in about 8 seconds.” Tea also occurs in moments of stillness and presence, during meditation and in natural environments.
However, some of the most extreme T-shirts are associated with psychedelic substances such as LSD and ayahuasca. In my T-shirt collection, about 10% are psychedelic related. One man said that while on an LSD experience, he looked at his cell phone’s stopwatch and saw that “hundredths of a second was ticking as slowly as a normal second.” “It was a really intense time delay,” he said.
but why? One theory is that these experiences are related to the release of norepinephrine (both a hormone and a neurotransmitter) associated with the “fight or flight” mechanism in emergency situations. But this doesn’t match the mild euphoria people usually report with teases.
People usually feel strangely calm and relaxed, even if their lives are at risk. For example, a woman who was wearing a T-shirt when she fell off a horse told me, I was very calm and didn’t care that the horse had not yet regained his balance and would probably fall on top of me. ” The noradrenaline theory is also inconsistent with the fact that many teas occur in peaceful situations, such as deep meditation or oneness with nature.
Another theory I considered is that T-shirts are an evolutionary adaptation. Perhaps our ancestors developed the ability to slow down time to increase their chances of survival in emergency situations, such as encounters with dangerous wild animals or natural disasters. However, the above discussion still applies here. This does not apply to non-emergency situations where tees occur.
A third theory is that Tee is an illusion of memory rather than a real experience. According to this theory, in emergency situations, our consciousness becomes sharper and takes in more perceptions than normal. These perceptions are encoded in our memory, so when we recall an emergency situation, the redundant memories create the impression that time has slowed down.
However, I am sure that at many teas people had extra time to think and act. Time dilation has allowed for complex sequences of thought and actions that would not have been possible if time had passed at its normal speed. A recent (unpublished) survey of 280 tees found that less than 3% of participants believed the experience was illusory. Approximately 87% believed it was a real experience that happened now, while 10% were unsure.
altered state of consciousness
In my opinion, the key to understanding Tee lies in altered states of consciousness. The sudden shock of an accident can disrupt our normal psychological processes and cause sudden changes in consciousness. In sports, intense states of change occur due to what I call “superabsorption.”
Typically, when you’re immersed in a task, time passes faster when you’re absorbed, like in a flow state. However, when absorption becomes particularly intense during prolonged periods of sustained concentration, the opposite occurs: time slows down rapidly.
Altered states of consciousness can also affect our sense of identity and the normal sense of separation between us and the world. As psychologist Mark Whitman has pointed out, our sense of time is closely tied to our sense of self.
We usually have a sense that there is a world within our mental space and a world beyond it. One of the main characteristics of intense states of change is a diminished sense of separation. We no longer feel trapped within our minds, but connected to our surroundings.
This means that the boundaries between us and the world become softer. And in the process, our sense of time expands. We slip outside of normal consciousness into another world of time.
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